When a snowboarder slipped off Lift 6 Tuesday, it wasn’t the sweeping wind or the crunch of new snow she heard. It was music, and she sang along, out loud:

“Cold hearted, man, I’m so robotic
not like you forgot but I’m slightly psychotic
I’m here to terrorize the world
And [freak] the minds up of you boys and girls.”

That’s Swollen Members’ Mad Child, and the girl singing his demented, angry lyrics is one of millions of examples where rap and snowboarding converge. Another comes this weekend, when urban ethnic acts such as Blackalicious, Macy Gray and Spearhead perform in one of the least urban, least ethnic places in Colorado.

But it somehow makes sense, seeing as how those acts have long provided the soundtracks for thousands of ski runs and — especially for Swollen Members — nearly as many ski movies.

“We never really tailored our music to be on snowboard videos and stuff,” says Rob the Viking, producer and beatmaker for Swollen. “It just comes naturally.”

The question is: why?

When Telluride kids made a ski video that plays on local public access TV, they scored it with Cypress Hill’s “Rap Superstar.” A great song, and a great song for park rats, and part of a general trend in ski filmmaking, says Jesse Lakes, editor/founder of SkiMovieMusic.com, which catalogues and rates the best of the genre.

“Jibbing, I am sure, had a big push on why so much rap (and hip hop) music has been used so commonly,” he writes in an email. “A handful of films this year focus on just jibbing, and some of the best jibbing is found in the inner city.”

**

This Wednesday, at seven in the morning, the SWAT team came to Mad Child’s house.
“All these [freaking] cops all [freaking] rifled up … seven or eight cop cars at my door,” a real mad Mad Child says over the phone.

Mad Child, whose real name is Shane Bunting, lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, four hours outside Vancouver, in a big, gray ranch-style house whose gates he refused to open for the cops, who said they wanted to search his house looking for a friend of his.
“The police have always had like a thing for me,” Mad Child says. “For the last five years I’ll get pulled over by the police for no reason, and like three, four cop cars will pull up behind us.”

It’s a little bit Schadenfreude-y, seeing that Mad Child is having trouble with the law. But it’s always nice when the vision of someone you have from his music lines up with who actually is.

“Cops hate me they wanna throw me in jail, hate to think if they got me alone in a cell,” he raps.

And then there it is, in Thursday’s editions of the National Post and the Vancouver Sun, which reported that the cops later arrested a 35-year-old Hell’s Angel in another location, one of 19 Hell’s Angels arrested across Canada and the U.S. (Swollen featured some Angels in music videos in 2003.)

“I know a lot of these gangsta rappers are just full of it,” Mad Child says. “My life is prob’ly a lot more real than a lot of those cats.”

Swollen Members, of course, would be a great band even if they didn’t have all this baggage, these headlines. They’re the biggest selling Canadian rap act of all time, and Mad Child is working on a solo album, while Swollen works on their sixth studio CD.
Mad Child raps about being depressed, a recluse, “slightly psychotic,” and paranoid.

It’s part of what makes his rhymes so good and his persona so alluring: it’s not chest-beating about money, cash hoes. Mad Child, more than anybody else since Eminem, comes off every bit a deeply flawed human.

“It’s not just like some pretension,” says Rob the Viking. “It’s not like some publicity stunt.”


**

Teenagers keep discovering Swollen Members, often through films and experiences like the Base Camp, and putting them on their iPods and skiing the best lines they ever have.

With their sexually explicit name that makes town council members giggle and virtually guarantees they’ll never get on the Today Show, Swollen Members may have to settle for being the darlings of the ski movies and snowboarders’ iPods everywhere.

“Swollen Members are just good,” Lakes writes. “For me, a good [ski song] is something that … makes you just want to get to your feet and go. Something that makes your mind click into that ‘stoke’ zone.”

And, really, is that such a bad fate?